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Budget 2012, which has been trumpeted for weeks by Conservative insiders as a "transformative" document that would set the country on a new path toward smaller government, landed with a whimper rather than a bang Thursday, delivering the usual gewgaws, modest spending cuts and precious little that will excite small-c conservatives.

Oh, and the penny's on the way out. Ho hum.

Indeed, this budget is not substantially different, either in content or tone, from any of the Harper government's previous six, except for the limited spending reductions. It may as well have come from a Chretien-Martin Liberal government, for all the red meat it throws to the Conservative base. A majority of Conservative MPs had been pushing for a radical overhaul of government operations and substantial reductions in spending that would have allowed them to campaign on a balanced budget in 2015. Clearly, with the Prime Minister's Office on the defensive politically after two months of missteps and scandal, the hawks were overruled.

Finance previously had said spending cuts would fall in a range between $4 billion and $8 billion, on operating spending of about $75 billion. It delivered cuts at the low end of that range, of $5.2 billion. Tellingly, rather than trumpet the extent of the cuts, the government was at pains to emphasize their modesty.

"We have no need to resort to the drastic cuts being forced upon some other developed countries today," Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told the House of Commons. "We have no need to undertake the radical austerity measures imposed by the federal government in the 1990s." No need, indeed. Canada's debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to decline to 28.5 per cent by 2016-17, which will push it back to where it was before the recession of 2009, but no further.

The books aren't to be balanced, meantime, until fiscal year 2015-16, a year later than fiscal hawks had hoped. That's assuming continuing global economic growth between now and then, which is not a given.

The government expects to reduce the number of federal civil servants by 19,200, or 4.8 per cent, over three years, including through attrition. Again, this is a modest reduction, given that the federal civil service has grown at three times the rate of population growth over the past decade. Expectations had been for job cuts of up to 100,000.

Of the big-ticket items previously flagged by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his famous "blueprint" speech in Davos, changes to the Old Age Security program were the most controversial. As expected, the age of eligibility for OAS will indeed rise to 67 from the current 65, but in a gradual process that won't begin until 2023. No one currently over the age of 54 will be affected. That neatly allows the Tories to avoid rankling the biggest bulge of retired or soon-to-retire baby boomers. It also means, of course, that the measure may be overturned by a future Liberal or New Democratic government.

Red-meat Conservatives who'd been eagerly anticipating the Tories enthusiastically laying waste to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, that nest of elitist, latte-sipping eastern liberals, will need to look elsewhere than in this budget for satisfaction. Though the national broadcaster's budget is indeed being trimmed by $115 million (on a total budget of about $1 billion), how it's to be done remains a mystery. The Canada Council, the National Gallery and national museums, meantime, will not see their budgets cut at all.

There's a grab bag of measures intended to improve conditions on aboriginal reserves, including a promise to introduce a First Nations Educations Act. There's a commitment to "build on steps already taken" to enable "interested First Nations to assume greater control over their reserve lands, resources and environment," which in practice, means moving beyond the strictures of the outdated and racist Indian Act.

But there is no mention of the Act itself, let alone of abolishing or moving beyond it. Reform to allow private property on reserves, which one might imagine would be dear to Conservative hearts, is relegated to a single timid line: The government intends to "explore with interested First Nations the option of moving forward with legislation that would allow for this." Now there's a clarion cry.

Resource development, we were led to expect in the weeks leading up to the budget, would be dramatically overhauled, forever changing how big-ticket mining and energy projects are approved. As expected, the budget promises that reviews for major projects will be made more timely; duplication will be reduced; consultations with Aboriginal Peoples will be enhanced, all while strengthening environmental protection. How, precisely is all this to occur? To be determined.

Immigration measures in the budget — principally a commitment to more closely match immigrants with the skills required by Canadian employers — are intriguing. But here again, just as with a proffered "marketization" of research and development spending, most of these measures were announced by the relevant minister weeks ago, and in greater detail.

Government insiders have sought for weeks to portray Budget 2012 as a revolutionary template for change, one that would allow the Tories to at last put their definitive stamp on the country. On its face, it is anything but.

This is a cautious, middle-of-the-road plan designed neither to excite nor to offend. It reads as though the Conservatives still had a minority government.

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